AES E-Library

A Robust Audio Watermarking System for Acoustic Channels

Digital audio watermarking has become a popular technique in recent years to reduce illegal file sharing of music and to identify listener broadcast preferences. The added watermarking signal is made inaudible by exploiting the frequency and temporal masking effects of the human auditory system. Watermarking codes are embedded in the time-frequency domain using a sparse multicarrier approach. Because the watermarking is often decoded in an enclosed environment, it must be robust against such impairments as reverberation, microphone self-noise, movement, and interferences from extraneous sound sources. Subjective and objective testing showed that both robustness and inaudibility can be obtained.